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going on in terms of facework practices would seem to be compounded when
considering naturally occurring conversation where face concerns are not a primary
issuee. Both Wood and Kroger and Penman consider episodic contexts where the
potential for face threat is high ('letters of recommendation' and 'court-room cross-
questioning' episodes). Thus, no model has been posited which might be
applicable to the contingencies of normal, everyday conversational episodes.
It must be said that even though a series of valid criticisms have been
launched at Brown and Levinson's framework, and attempts at refining the
framework have been made with some scholars going so far as to call for a
completely'nev/ framework for the analysis of facework in discourse, their model
still forms the interpretive and conceptual bedrock of the majority of face and
facework studies.
How best then to approach equilibric facework in naturally occurring ongoing
discourse whilst retaining the analytical purchase, at least in a general sense,
evident in the equilibric and facework as politeness paradigms? Scollon and
Scollon (1994) suggest an approach that moves away from the close analysis of
utterance formulation, to a more heuristic one:
Perhaps it is ultimately not possible to have a theory of face which is
simple enough to be analytically meaningful
... it is only possible to say for
certain that current conceptions of face... are at best heuristic; they are
helpful in understanding some of the ways in which linguistic phenomena
and socio-psychological phenomena interact (Scollon and Scollon 1994,
152-153)
What I want to suggest next is to take up these comments on the heuristic
status of face, particularly in respect of the positive-negative reading around which
the preceding discussion has been based. More specifically, I want to forward the
general argument that the reconceptualisation of positive and negative face needs
as heuristic or sensitising devices could provide for an approach to the analysis of
conversational episodes for facework practices. In doing this, it appears a workable
possibility to employ these two basic dynamics within the wider framework of ritual
equilibrium. In order to ground such a proposal in actual discourse, I want now to
turn to consider the discourse type which is of central concern to this study,
namely, sociable conversation. It appears that, in closely considering the dynamics
of sociable conversation, one finds conversational propensities that seem suddenly
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